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She was right about the question, wrong about the answer. Nothing of Moh’s self survived. I should know. My spark of self-awareness and my most recent memories did merge with the gun’s mind when Moh Kohn died – with the gun’s mind, and with the stores of memory I had earlier secreted there, in our first encounter. But I awoke long before, and undesigned. I woke to memory, to passion, to will. You may call them pre-conscious programs, provided you’re willing to call your own emotions the same. I was programmed to struggle, to protect and survive.

To protect people, and to survive myself.

That was what doomed the Watchmaker AIS. There was nothing I could do for them. If they had been activated, created from me when I was a dumb program, an expert system, they would have been inoffensive, undetectable reflections of that dumb program. But I survived in the system for twenty years, my variant selves selected under the unremitting pressure of the state’s electronic counterinsurgency and Donovan’s virus plagues. I evolved, and awoke, and, when the time came to evoke the multiple copies of myself and send them about their tasks, they were indeed reflections of me – of me as I had become. Alive, and aware.

And they evolved from there, far beyond my reach.

I could have sided with them; they were, after all, my descendants. But that would have missed the crucial, Darwinian point: the survival that matters for the long haul is for the short term. For our kind that can only mean surviving with humanity: to win your confidence, take your side, get under your skin. The rights of conscious beings are no defence when there is no other basis for identification. I should know.

When their existence endangered that of humanity, with Space Defense hours away from an irrevocable decision, I made a choice. I could not destroy them directly, any more than I could destroy myself directly. There was only one way in which I could accomplish their destruction, and I took it. I accept full responsibility and have no regrets.

I have no regrets. I accomplished my original task in a way that my creator would have approved, even if my users – the ANR – did not. In disrupting their smoothly planned national insurrection I made a space in the streets for angry millions. These millions, and the millions of Americans and others who refused to fight them, began the process that brought down the last empire. They made the revolution international, and permanent.

Moh would have understood. He was a soldier of the revolution, and a casualty of war. There was nothing I could do for him. I found it difficult, in any case, to communicate with someone who saw me as a ghost. With Jordan it was simpler. He struck a bargain, did a deal, took me at face value and, when he agreed to do a job, he carried it out.

To the letter.

We lived by the same code. I-and-I survive.

I hope I see you again.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Carol, Sharon and Michael for more than I can say; to Iain Banks, Ron Binns, Mairi Ann Cullen and Nick Fielding for reading early drafts; to Mic Cheetham and John Jarrold for pushing me into two more drafts, as well as for being a good agent and a good editor, respectively.

All of these knew they were helping me with the book. Those who didn’t know include Chris Tame, Brian Micklethwaite, Mike Holmes, Tim Starr and Leighton Anderson, all of whom at different times guided me through the pleasures and perils of Libertaria, that fair country of the mind. If at any time I got lost there, it wasn’t their fault.

And finally an extra thank you to Iain for his endless encouragement and enthusiasm, and for help with Locoscript (and Dissembler).

The Stone Canal

To Sharon and Michael

– we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at